A WRITER'S WITThe important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn.Sir John LubbockBorn April 30, 1834

Plain but Amusing

Due to having to make an unexpected out-of-town trip, I was unable to meet my self-imposed deadline of posting "My Book World" tonight. Instead, I present more backyard birdcam pictures. Grackles have never been so funny nor robins so coy.

A WRITER'S WIT. . . romance is invariably flavoured with the extreme.Walter de la MareBorn April 25, 1873

Whose Myth?

Edel Rodriguez

April 28, 2014, Shirley Jackson, “The Man in the Woods”: Christopher, a college student, finds himself walking in a forest for several days. ¶ The story unfolds as a myth, each element and each character having its own purpose. Even the trees are personified, have their purpose of welcoming Christopher to the forest, “bending their great bodies toward him.” A cat joins him, acting more like a dog would. An old woman named Circe enters the story. ¶ I believe one reason Ms. Jackson may have left this story unpublished is that it has no tension. It unfolds from beginning to end with little variation in tone. I don’t mind reading a story that ends a bit mysteriously, causing the reader to wonder, but if the entire story is uttered in the same breath without a clear shape, it may not, FORGIVE ME, be a story. And once again this selection aces out a younger and LIVING writer from being published in the magazine. Garlic in Fiction is, as I write, being edited by Ms. Jackson’s children for a Random House release next year.Edel Rodriguez, Illustrator

Backyard Birdcam Photos

A WRITER'S WITThere's no greater bliss in life than when the plumber eventually comes to unblock your drains. No writer can give that sort of pleasure.Victoria GlendinningBorn April 23, 1937

My Book World

Carr, Cynthia. Fire in the Belly: the Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012.Long book (over 600 pages). Long post.David Wojnarowiz (voyna-ROW-vich) was born in 1954. His father beat him, and he was sexually abused by older boys. He barely finished high school and did not attend college, yet in the 1980s he became, for a short time, an art sensation in New York. He didn't care about success, often living hand to mouth, and refused to take the next step that would ensure stability. That would have been selling out. Click here to view his work.

"David's work was full of sex and violence—politics expressed at the level of the body. He painted distress. Soldiers and bombers. Falling buildings and junkies. His images had the tension of some niceness opened up to its ruined heart. In the montages he began to develop, David would expose the Real Deal under the artifacts—wars and rumors of wars, industrial wastelands, mythological beasts, and the evolutionary spectrum from dinosaur to humanity's rough beast" (231).

David was gay but arrived at that place by way of a rather indirect route. He preferred the intimacy of a relationship but often turned to the anonymous sex prevalent in New York City until the AIDS crisis became a problem. In the late eighties, he and his longtime companion were tested and both came up HIV positive.

"David was beginning to consciously connect his family's pathology to a larger worldview. He added an anecdote in the Eye about watching a cop kick a dope-sick junkie while arresting him: 'And I'm feeling rage 'cause in the midst of my bad mood this cop is inadvertently reaching in with his tentacles and probing in ice-pick fashion some vulnerable area from years ago maybe when my dad took me down in the basement for another routine of dog chain and baseball bat beatings or when he killed my pet rabbit and made me eat it . . . blam . . . blam . . . blam'" (312).

The death of so many men may be one of the reasons why I continue to write. Not only must I do so in order to stay sane, alive, but I must do it for these people whose lives were cut short by a hateful and unrelenting disease—and a still indifferent culture. I'm surely not as gifted as David Wojnarowicz, but I must not waste the time given me. I participated in some of the same risky behaviors that many of my contemporaries did, and I was fortunate enough to emerge with a different roll of the dice. I must work to honor David and Tom. Would they still be together now? Would David have embraced his success? Would his burgeoning career have matured or fizzled out? Multiply his life times the hundreds or thousands of gifted gay men of that era who died. Their voices continue to shout at us from their discordant chorus. We owe a great debt to Cynthia Carr for allowing us to hear one of these voices loud and clear.

A WRITER'S WITNo civilized person ever goes to bed the same day he gets up.Richard Harding DavisBorn April 18, 1864

Something Stolen

April 28, 2014, Thomas McGuane, “Hubcaps”: Owen, a child of two heavy drinkers, develops a quiet life that includes hiding a couple of small turtles at the bottom of his lunchbox and stealing hubcaps for his collection. ¶ As always, McGuane’s story is rich with details about the setting, the characters. Owen’s inner life, like that of many lonely children, is both desolate and rich. He may collect other people’s hubcaps as a way of feeding his bereft inner life. But this life is also rich with kindness and an awareness that others do not have. He, for example, is able to enumerate both the gifts and the deficits of all the Kershaw brothers’ abilities as baseball players—without judgment. He is able to befriend the mentally challenged youngest Kershaw brother without gathering much attention. The subtle climax seems to occur when something precious of Owen's is taken from him. As his parents separate, he continues to steal hubcaps at football games. “As time went on, it wasn’t only the games: any public event would do.” McGuane’s Driving on the Rim was published in 2010.Design by Radio.NEXT TIME: MY BOOK WORLD

A WRITER'S WITIf you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing.Kingsley AmisBorn April 16, 1922

Serenity

2004. October 30. End of season at La Serrania, a retreat on the island of Mallorca, Spain. The air is about seventy-eight degrees, the water much much cooler, as the pool is not heated. The sky is full of clouds. It may rain, but for the moment, the air is inviting, issuing the last gasp of summer, and no one wants to miss a second of it.

I used a Kodak digital, c2000, and it didn't handle the sun as well as later cameras, but the shot is still a favorite of mine.

A WRITER'S WITLife goes on and on after one's luck has run out. Youthfulness persists, alas, long after one has ceased to be young. --The Pilgrim HawkGlenway WescottBorn April 11, 1901

Boxed In

Grant Cornett

April 14, 2014, Roddy Doyle, “Box Sets”: Sam, a Dubliner who has lost his job, takes his dog for a walk and is run into by a cyclist. ¶ Prior to his accident, Sam has thrown a coffee mug at the kitchen wall. He’s angry, not necessarily at his loving wife, Emer, but at his circumstances. It’s like stirring a pot of anger over slights he feels their friends have committed, over not having a job, over Emer’s suggestion that he should volunteer until something turns up. As in all good short stories, the protagonist experiences a change. How does his transformation relate to all that has happened, to the boxed sets of TV dramas like Mad Men and The Wire mentioned so early in the story? Tune in to see! The Guts is Doyle’s latest novel.Grant Cornett, Photograph

Wescott at 113

Glenway Wescott is one of those writers who perhaps never received the attention he should have. As deft and nuanced in his writing as E. M. Forster or Christopher Isherwood, also gay writers born about the same time as he, Wescott never quite got the breaks as those two. Because today marks his birthday, I recommend two books, the first one about him, the second by him.

Rosco makes clear that Glenway Wescott was a writer who wrote because he loved to, not because he felt he should make a living from it. A contemporary of Isherwood, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Marianne Moore, Katherine Anne Porter, Wescott was befriended by most of these people (except for Hemingway who, in a homophobic fit, used Wescott as a model for a character in one of his novels).

Protagonist Alwyn Tower speaking: “Indeed, it was an instinctive law for Americans, the one he had broken. Never be infatuated with nor try to interpret as an omen the poverty, the desperation, of the past; whoever remembers it will be punished, or punish himself; never remember. Upon pain of loneliness, upon pain of a sort of expatriation though at home. At home in a land of the future where all wish to be young; a land of duties well done, irresponsibly, of evil done without immorality, and good without virtue” (39).

Short but piercing novel set entirely in one afternoon in 1940, one that turns out to be quite a charade. A woman “owns” a hawk as a pet, and it sets up obvious symbolism of control, freedom, but also a more subtle symbol for her marriage.

A WRITER'S WITAs we advance in life, we acquire a keener sense of the value of time. Nothing else, indeed, seems of any consequence; and we become misers in this respect.William HazlittBorn April 10, 1778

Santa Fe Boy 1980

I was trying to capture the geometry of the shadow play on the sidewalk, and out strolls this delightful kid into the shot. His shadow is like a ghost, a second personality perhaps. In the production of the photograph, I have to sacrifice what the overhead signs (a favorite subject of mine) have to say. Ah.

O'Brien, Master of Form

I love O’Brien’s stories, and I know I shall return to them again and again because they do not unfold easily, necessarily, the first time. In “Shovel Kings,” a first-person narrator recalls another character (Rafferty) who then tells the story—rather by way of being interviewed by the narrator. Interesting approach, and I’m not sure why it is so effective. If Rafferty tells the story himself, alone, then perhaps there is inherent some sort of weakness in it. If the narrator alone tells about Rafferty without his input . . . then again the story is weak for it. I must remember this approach to see if it might work. It is rich; it is effective.

In “Black Flower,” I like how O’Brien develops the character in such a manner that is so facile—but isn’t really. The black flower is a subtle metaphor for the man, but also the malaise existing between the two factions. “The petals were soft, velvety black, with tiny green eyes, pinpoints, and there was something both beautiful and sinister about it” (76).

“Old Wounds” is the story I like best in this collection. The lazy back-and-forthness through time, I suppose. The wounds, the healing of the wounds, the wounds again. Fight, make up. Like many families. Wounds. Heal.

A WRITER'S WIT Any book that helps a child to form a habit of reading, to make reading one of his deep and continuing needs, is good for him.Maya AngelouBorn April 4, 1928

Seafaring Landlubber

Patrik Svensson

April 7, 2014, Jonathan Lethem, “Pending Vegan”: Paul Espeseth is coming off an antidepressant and visits San Diego’s Sea World with his wife and twin four-year-old daughters. ¶ Lethem seems to capture that netherworld between an on-drug/not-on-drug life. His nameless wife is but an aloof caregiver, as if he is another one of her children. And in any number of ways he is. Paul renames himself Pending Vegan, fully aware of the questionable methods by which meat-eating is achieved, yet loving the saltiness of pork. With the thought of having to postpone his hunger-busting behavior, Paul buys a turkey leg to gnaw on. His wife is annoyed, and he becomes a victim of his love for meat. ¶ I enjoy Lethem’s writing very much. His literary references, his cultural and spiritual references, are all in service of the narrative, in this case, about a man caught between two worlds. Paul Espeseth, too, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, whom he cites, has the “capacity to keep two opposed ideas in mind at the same time.” Read to find out how! Lethem’s most recent novel is Dissident Gardens.Patrik Svensson, Illustrator

A WRITER'S WITPerfection is such a nuisance that I often regret having cured myself of using tobacco.Emile ZolaBorn April 2, 1840

Messing Up Mother Nature

On the same visit that Ken and I made to Yellow House Canyon several weeks ago, we saw some things that weren't so pretty. Officially, a road has been rerouted, and so has the pathway for floods, should they ever occur again. The other things not so pretty were in the form of trash that individuals feel entitled to throw in the canyon because they can't think of anywhere else to put it. Just kids with too much time and too many tires on their hands? I wonder.